Comedic works represent a relatively miniscule portion of my media consumption, a fact that my younger brothers were quick to pick up on this past summer. When I mentioned that I’d just finished watching another anime, the conversation between us went something like this:

“Was it sad?”
“…why would you think it was sad?”
“Because you watched it.”

Considering that the anime I’d watched most recently were Attack on Titan, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Code Geass, and Cowboy Bebop–each one of them containing scenes ranging from the mildly melancholy to the soul-crushingly depressing–I realized that they had a point.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, despite its name, is a much more cheerful show than anything else I’ve watched recently. It’s chock-full of hilarious antics, over-the-top characters, and preposterous situations, all backed up by a narrator who is clearly exasperated about being forced to participate in them (and a soundtrack that makes me dance in my seat).

An average afternoon for Kyon.

The basic plot is fairly simple. Kyon, an ordinary high school student, unwittingly gives his classmate Haruhi the idea to create a club known as the SOS Brigade, whose purpose is “to find aliens, time travelers, and espers, and hang out with them!” In addition to Kyon, Haruhi recruits three other members for the Brigade: quiet and emotionless Yuki Nagato, cute but easily intimidated Mikuru Asahina, and perpetually smiling transfer student Itsuki Koizumi. By the third episode it is revealed (not particularly surprisingly) that the three other brigade members are an alien, a time traveler, and an esper, respectively. All three inform (and warn) Kyon that, unconsciously, Haruhi is able to alter reality with her wishes. The remainder of the plots in the series deal with various situations, ranging from solving mysteries to preparing for school events.

tl;dr version: A club composed mostly of supernatural beings must ensure their classmate doesn’t discover that she’s God.

That brings us to today’s topic. After watching an epic video-game duel between the SOS Brigade and Computer Club–rendered in an imaginative style reminiscent of some scenes in Calvin and Hobbes–the last thing I had expected was for the next arc of episodes to keep me on the edge of my seat with tension and no small amount of horror.

“Endless Eight” (エンドレスエイト, Endoresu Eito) is an arc that encompasses the brigade’s summer break. The first episode is fairly innocuous as far as Suzumiya goes, and involves the usual plotline of Haruhi dragging her friends/minions into as many entertaining situations as she can: trips to the public pool, batting cages, and a festival; a “test of courage,” fireworks display, and bug-catching contest; and multiple meals at their favorite cafe (reluctantly funded by Kyon). All in all, I enjoyed the episode as a fairly standard example of the series.

I didn’t move on to the next episode until the following day. At first I was confused, then slightly disconcerted, as the events of the previous episode re-played almost exactly. At one point I skipped ahead in the episode to make sure that I wasn’t just watching the same episode over again, only to find that the details were subtly different: different swimsuits during their trips to the public pool, different drinks at the cafe, and a sense of underlying unease in the narration. Kyon’s vague remembrance of having seen all of this before was reinforced by my definite remembrance of having seen all of this before. Matters come to a head that night, when the four other Brigade members meet and realize that they have, indeed, seen all of this before. Yuki, the only member who remembers what has happened, reports that they have repeated the last two weeks of summer, from August 17th until 31st, almost 15,500 times (595 years). For me, that was the moment of true horror.

From my perspective, “true horror” isn’t something that makes you jump or scream. It’s cerebral in nature: something that sticks to the back of your mind and gnaws at it until you feel like you can’t take it anymore. It’s the long moments of inaction in Alien before the monster appears, the gaping voids of nothing that leave you teetering at the edge of your chair. It’s the rising tension in Slender as you walk through the park with nothing but the narrow beam of your flashlight and the sound of your own footsteps for company, knowing that somewhere out in the darkness, a monster is lurking.

It’s also, as Caster pointed out in Fate/Zero, “the moment where hope turns to despair.” Over and over again, as they reach the final days of the time loop with no idea how to break free, the Brigade tries to figure out what they can do, and over and over again the answer they come up with is “nothing.” The aura of fatalism that hangs over all of them on August 31st is tangible, especially knowing that as soon as midnight on August 31st arrived, they’ll forget everything that happened over the last two weeks. Kyon, who in the first episode of the arc had scrambled to get his homework done before the end of the summer, repeatedly gives up on doing it at all. The fact that the episodes’ titles are all exactly the same (only differing in the arrangement of the katakana on the screen) gives it an even more disconcerting, surreal feeling.

Eventually, of course, the Brigade members manage to break free of the time loop, but the episodes have had a major impact on me nonetheless. As I sit here writing this post, I can’t help but wondering if, somewhere across the world, a bored girl is dreaming for the 15,000th time of the two endless weeks between August 17th and 31st. Call me paranoid, but with the homework I have for tomorrow I can see the appeal.

In any case, I’d better sign off. If tomorrow does come, as it is inclined to do in the real world, it would be quite unfortunate if I left work undone.

Minor spoilers follow for: Tangled, The Dark Knight, Death Note, Watchmen, The Lord of the Rings, and Attack on Titan.

Last week, while I was listening to Blumenkranz, I decided that it was high time I figured out what its lyrics actually meant. While I learned that the German was not, technically speaking, particularly accurate, there was one lyric in particular that caught my attention: “Diese Welt ist grausam, es ist traurig aber wahr.” Roughly translated it means “This world is cruel, it’s sad but true.” And that got me thinking.

One of the first rules of dramatic storytelling is that there must be some form of conflict to draw the interest of the audience. Without conflict of some kind, the story does not exist. According to Wikipedia, there are four main types of conflict; according to TV Tropes, either seven or eight. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be concentrating on the third and fourth main types of conflict, Man* vs. Nature and Man* vs. Society.

*(In the context of this blog post, Man refers to humankind as a whole rather than being a gender-specific pronoun. Please excuse the political incorrectness.)

Both of these conflict types have Man* struggling against something that must be survived or overcome: in the case of Nature, a primordial force that is natural to the world, and in the case of Society, a construct of Man* imposed upon the world. The idea of “human nature” fills both of these conflict roles quite nicely.

With that said, I’ve broken down three types of approaches to the perception of the world, with handy examples attached.

The Idealist approach is most commonly used in works directed at children. The Disney movie Tangled is a notable example. While there are, of course, villains, the implication of the setting is that humans, by nature, are inclined towards good. The best illustration of this in Tangled is the “I’ve Got A Dream” musical number, which subverts the usual idea that Beauty Equals Goodness by showing the softer sides of all of the thugs in the Snuggly Duckling. Despite their frightening appearances, all of them are ultimately eager to help Rapunzel follow her dream, and in the end they rescue Flynn despite their dislike of him. This goes sharply against Mother Gothel’s assertions from “Mother Knows Best”, where she effusively and exaggeratedly describes what a terrible place the world outside is. Of course, this being a Disney movie, it doesn’t take more than 90 minutes of runtime for Rapunzel to decide that such a view is wrong, and subsequently reject it–much to Mother Gothel’s shock and anger.

While such a revelation may seem like it would be out of place anywhere but in a children’s movie. the same revelation is used similarly at the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. The Joker, attempting to spice things in Gotham up and vindicate his belief that anyone can be corrupted, rigs two ferries–one filled with civilians attempting to evacuate the city, the other filled with criminals from the prison–with explosives, and gives each ferry the detonator for the other with the ultimatum that, unless one of them has destroyed the other before a certain time, he will destroy both. What follows is an affirmation of the inherent goodness of human nature. The civilian with the detonator, despite his assertions that he would feel no guilt over killing criminals to save innocent lives, is ultimately unable to force himself to take the lives of others. The audience is given a scare when an intimidating-looking prisoner threatens to forcibly take the detonator and “do what you should have [done] ten minutes ago”, but expectations are wonderfully subverted when, upon being handed the detonator, he immediately throws it out the window, removing the prisoners’ chance to save themselves at the expense of others’ lives. Even in a movie as grim-looking as The Dark Knight, the final point made is that humans, by nature, are good.

Type Two: The Cynical Approach

“This world is rotten, and those who are making it rot deserve to die.“
– Light Yagami, Death Note

This approach is the polar opposite of everything that the previous approach stood for. Here, human nature is portrayed as something ugly and frightening, and to characters in these works, belief in the world’s corruption is prevailing rather than uncommon. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, the vigilantes make their disgust with the Cold War-era world quite apparent. Rorschach, the most bitterly cynical of the Watchmen, has come to the conclusion that humanity deserves to suffer for their actions. Ozymandias, the world’s most intelligent man, has a different plan. By setting up the destruction of an entire city, he hopes to intimidate the world’s superpowers into making peace with each other–peace made out of fear of a common enemy (alien invasion in the original graphic novel, Doctor Manhattan in the film adaptation). Upon learning that his plan has already been carried out, most of the Watchmen reluctantly agree to keep his secret for the sake of preserving the tenuous peace, but Rorschach refuses to submit, even when confronted by Doctor Manhattan. The confrontation culminates with Doctor Manhattan’s assertion that “I can change almost anything… but I can’t change human nature” before he kills Rorschach to keep the secret safe. The implication of this scene is a far cry from the one in The Dark Knight: it suggests that, if left to their own devices, humans will invariably choose evil.

Another notable example of the cynical approach is in the anime Death Note. Light Yagami, a brilliant and ambitious high school student, discovers a notebook–the eponymous Death Note–with supernatural powers. If he writes someone’s name in the notebook while picturing their face, they will die. Light first uses the notebook to kill criminals, but after initial doubts he very quickly decides that he will use the Death Note to re-make the world in his own image, becoming its God, and subsequently begins using the Death Note’s powers to kill the police and detectives attempting to stop his killing spree. Light’s conviction that the world was corrupt and in need of redemption was what ultimately led him down the path of a killer. In both Death Note and Watchmen, the corruption of the world is presented as a problem that needs to be solved, and the implication of both works is that moral means will simply not be sufficient.

Type Three: The Realist Approach

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!”
– Sam Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings

The final approach is a much broader category, which I have dubbed “Realism” for convenience. Realist approaches to the nature of the world and humanity can be found in a variety of different works. The realist approach acknowledges that both good and evil are natural parts of the world. In Attack on Titan, the newly trained soldier cadets are thrown into a desperate defensive battle as they attempt to evacuate the civilians of Trost District. During a lull in the battle, Mikasa (one of the cadets) reflects on the cruelty of the world. Having witnessed her parents’ murder as a child, and still living under the threat of the Titans, she has an understandably dim view of the nature of the world. However, even after all that she still maintains close ties to her foster family, saying that as long as she has them, she can do anything. (Surprisingly enough, making such a remark does not immediately doom all of them to horrifically gory deaths… though it helps that one of them is the protagonist.)

The Lord of the Rings also takes a realist approach, though it is somewhat modified. In the Valar and Sauron, proof is given of the existence of both absolute Good and absolute Evil. Human nature (as well as Elven and Dwarven nature), on the other hand, is shown to be a variable thing. This is best exemplified in The Silmarillion. the collection of Tolkien’s mythos set prior to The Lord of the Rings, where the lust to gain the Silmarils causes the Elves and Men to fight with each other as often as they fight with their true enemies. This is echoed with the corruption of the Ring later on in the story. However, there is always a possibility of redemption: Boromir repents of his actions at his death, Sam stalwartly resists the Ring’s corruption despite the temptation to use its power to do good (Light Yagami could learn a thing or two from that), and even Gollum shows remorse over his actions. Not all of the commentary on morality is linked to the Ring, either. While journeying through the forest of Ithilien, Frodo and Sam run across a battle between Gondor’s rangers and a group of men traveling from the South to reinforce Sauron’s army. During the battle, one of the southerners falls near where Frodo and Sam are hidden. Sam wonders “what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace–all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.” (The Two Towers, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”) From this passage, we can see that Sam at least believes in both sides of human nature.

As I am already late in posting this, I won’t bother with a drawn-out conclusion. Hopefully this post has been food for thought, and should help you gain a greater appreciation of how various works deal with morality. Until next week!

Spoilers follow for: Star Wars, The Belgariad, The Sword of Truth, and of course the Inheritance books.

If there’s one thing that I’m willing to do, it’s give a series a chance. During my high school years, I voluntarily read the Twilight books: not because I expected to enjoy them, but simply so that I could see what the hype was about and, afterwards, be able to feel completely justified deconstructing the hype with all the condescension I could muster. Once that was done with, I never read them again.

The same goes for Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, a series that the more forgiving side considers a waste of a perfectly acceptable map, and my less forgiving side considers a waste of time and space. As an ardent reader of fantasy novels, I’ve waded through my share of substandard material (as per Sturgeon’s Law), but I don’t think I’ve ever taken such a dislike to a book on first reading. Accordingly, I’ve decided to analyze exactly what it is that I dislike about these books.

Yes, it’s going to be one of those posts.

First to go under the sacrificial knife is the plot, summarized here in the least specific way possible. Various trope links have been added for whatever reason.

Sometime in the distant past (one might say a long time ago), an order of knights with supernatural powers were the protectors of a quite extensive territory. Thanks to this order being composed of individuals from multiple races and sovereign states, there was peace throughout this territory… at least, until one of these supernaturally-powered fellows turned evil and decided that he wished to turn the territory into an Empire under his rule. Together with his top lieutenant (another knight turned evil), the Emperor initiated a massive purge from which only two others escaped. One of them retreated to isolation in a deep forest, while the other, after dueling with the Evil Lieutenant and taking his weapon, went to a slightly less isolated farming community to hide out.

Fast-forward enough years in the future for a child to grow to young adulthood, and we are introduced to exactly one such young man, our Protagonist. He lives in a farming community with his uncle (not knowing that his father was actually Evil Lieutenant!). However, after discovering a Plot Device sent into his general area by a princess, things quickly take a turn for the worse when servants of the Evil Empire show up, kill Protagonist’s uncle, and send Protagonist on the run along with the nearby ex-magic knight, who gives him his father’s sword but not his identity, so that he can go and join the rebels against the Evil Empire and rescue the princess and–

Okay, enough of that. Enough of the plot has been established that it’s instantly recognizable as Star Wars. Or, as it turns out, Eragon. The plots are literally identical, at least until about halfway through the third book of Inheritance, where Eragon stops being Luke Skywalker and decides to kill everyone instead.

On the multiple occasions when I’ve given this rant to die-hard fans of the book, I’ve received pretty much the same response. “Of course it’s similar to Star Wars! The Hero’s Journey is an archetypal plot!” While it’s true that both Star Wars and Eragon follow the basic steps of the Hero’s Journey, so too do more complex works such as The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, and The Journey To The West. The Hero’s Journey is a generalized outline that can be applied to many things. The plot of Star Wars is not.

On the other side of these sweeping generalities are the details, in which the devil lurks. While I could go on about one-handed swords five feet long, or impressive strategic moves that are anything but, there are only two details that continued to bother me: Eragon’s instant expertise at everything he puts his hand to, and the ultimate defeat of the villain. (Yes, this is the spoiler in question.)

The instant expertise is perhaps more jarring from a realistic standpoint (insofar as realism can be applied to a fantasy novel). In the space of the several weeks that Eragon spends traveling with Obi-wan Brom, he is tutored in magic, swordplay, and other useful things that The Chosen One might find interesting. Curiously, he discovers his magical power when, in a pinch, he shouts a word that Brom had said earlier in the book (which, in context, was described as swearing). Apart from the convenience of that, the mental image of someone deciding that their best chance of survival in an impossible situation is swearing loudly is always worthy of a giggle. Magic swearing. Still, magic is magic, which means that the ways of learning it can’t be related or applied to any real-life pursuit, so his quick pick-up of that gets a pass.

His mastery of swordsmanship, however, gets no such pass. I once read a study that postulated mastery of any one subject was most handily achieved by practice, practice, and more practice (thus vindicating both my mother and my piano teacher in one fell swoop). Ten thousand hours of is the most generally agreed-upon figure for such mastery to occur. The existence of magic provides an easy loophole should you be willing to take it, as demonstrated in the third book of Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth novels. The eponymous magic sword allows a true wielder, the Seeker of Truth, to draw upon its power, giving them the expertise of every single previous wielder of the sword, which makes the Seeker’s unique brand of sword-fighting into a kind of magic. Eragon’s sword, however, apart from being fancy and apparently unbreakable, has no magical powers of its own, which makes his metamorphosis from farm-boy to master duelist even more puzzling. Or stupid, depending on how charitable your inclinations are. But enough on that. The villain’s death bugged me more anyway

You see, at the climax of the fourth book, the Evil King Galbatorix has gathered together all of the Dragon Ballssoul gemseldunari from the dragons he’s killed, giving him almost unlimited magical power, as well as using the True Name of the Ancient Language to hijack magic itself so that nobody else could use it during the epic battle against the protagonists in his dark citadel. However, after events begin to go against him (since this story’s composite version of Darth Vader decided to let the True Name of magic slip), he uses a spell of unmaking (the precise wording is translated as “Be not”) to create a massive explosion in which he dies. And that’s that.

What bothers me about this is that this precise plot device had already been used in a fantasy novel that I read previously: David Eddings’ Magician’s Gambit, the third novel of The Belgariad, which was first published in 1983. At the climax of the book, the sorceror Ctuchik (don’t ask me how to pronounce it) engages in an epic battle against the protagonists in his dark citadel. However, after events begin to go against him, he uses a spell of unmaking (the precise wording is “Be not!”), which backfires and causes a massive explosion in which he dies. And that’s that.

My third argument is more of a gripe than anything else. If the name of the series is The Inheritance Cycle, that raises some interesting questions. If Inheritance is the last book of a cycle, does that mean that these events are a recurring loop? Could it be possible that, in fact, the events of Star Wars are actually the same recurring time loop, thrown forward thousands of years into the future after happening again and again and again? Could this be a stealth prequel?!?

Greetings, fellow denizens of the Internet! After some light urging from my lovely girlfriend, I’ve decided to begin keeping a chronicle of my miscellaneous thoughts on subjects from music and movies to books and video games. The site title refers to my hope that, no matter who you are, you will occasionally find one of the posts I make to be a worthwhile and enjoyable read, regardless of how obnoxiously extensive my vocabulary may be.

Spoilers for The Lord of the Rings follow, but I should hope that doesn’t present a problem. If you haven’t read them yet, drop everything and do so before reading the remainder of this post. (You monster.)

As it turns out, this week’s topic is worthwhile and enjoyable reading. I’ve been a voracious reader ever since I learned how it was done, and over the years there have been a few books that never seem to tire me, no matter how often I come back to them. I’ve read through The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit more times than I can count; enough that I can likely recite whole sections of them with minimal errors. One of my fondest childhood memories is my dad reading sections of them to my sister and I every night before bed. Not knowing where the story was going next was an exhilarating, giddy feeling. I remember being shocked and dismayed when Boromir’s lust for the Ring overtook his loyalty to the Fellowship, overjoyed when Gandalf came back from the dead to “complete his task”, and so tense during Frodo and Sam’s passage of the Dead Marshes that we had to stop reading and move on to a different, less frightening book.

I was all of six at the time.

Two years later, I would take our copy of The Two Towers off of the high shelf that it had been sitting on, dust off the cover, pull out the bookmark, and continue reading. After I finished The Two Towers, I moved on to The Return of the King. Then, abruptly realizing that I had forgotten how the characters had gotten to where they were in the first place, I did an abrupt about-turn and headed back to The Hobbit to experience the entire series once again, as if for the first time; then for the second, third, and fourth time. By the time that I saw The Return of the King in theaters on my 10th birthday, I had probably read all of Tolkien’s core works eight or nine times.

A desire to remember what happened is the most basic reason to re-read a book, though unfortunately my memory gives me little occasion to do so. I’ve idly mused on several occasions how nice it would be if there was some sort of device that allowed selective amnesia, allowing you to experience your favorite works with a fresh perspective, while being able to retain your previous viewpoints of the work to keep back for later. (“Experiencing them for the first time” doesn’t work as well in this situation, since it is, technically, inaccurate.) I’ve concluded that such a device is, in fact, theoretically impossible, since the human memory isn’t as tangible as, say, files on a hard drive. Deleting certain memories would be an all but impossible task. Contrary to what most modern fiction portrays, amnesia isn’t very precise or simple. Technobabble translation: Brains are hard to do.

Of course, there are numerous other reasons to re-read books. Take The Lord of the Rings as an example once again. To the six-year-old child that first listened to his father reading before bed, it was an exciting fantasy-story, a catalyst for dreams of adventure. To the slightly more worldly and sophisticated eight-year-old that scaled the bookshelf to retrieve a book, it was both a loose end (much like Gandalf’s incomplete task) and a chance to experience a story that Dad had assured me was very much worth my while. To the ten-year-old getting ready to see the story on the big screen, it was a familiar friend; to the twelve-year-old aspiring to be a writer, an excellent study in what the truly gifted could do with words. As my view broadened and I read peripheral works such as The Silmarillion and The Histories of Middle-earth, each subsequent reading brought new things to light, and deepened my appreciating of the work as a whole. Trivium: Strider was originally “Trotter,” a hobbit with wooden feet. Imagine Viggo Mortensen in that role.

The appendices, which had been little more than an afterthought to my younger self, utterly fascinated me during my middle- and high-school years, and I spent hours absorbed in them appreciating details both large–such as the painstakingly accurate Elvish syntax and grammar–and small–such as the offhand mention of the phases of the moon over the course of the Fellowship’s journey. It’s things like that that make a book re-reading: with each step you take, there’s no telling where you’ll be swept off to.

Our family’s original hardcover copies of the Lord of the Rings books have practically disintegrated by now, having gone through the hands of not one or two but four children, with a fifth only recently through her first Daddy-daughter reading of them. Entire chapters have fallen out only to be carefully replaced, and the familiar symbol of the Ring of Power on the front cover has almost faded away. That, in itself, is a testament to a book worth re-reading.